But first a note. This is the first update to this blog for nearly two and a half years. Since then, I have primarily shared many of the ideas I would have written about in a past life via my podcast, the Swim Brief. Lately, though, I’ve been drawn back to writing. For reasons that are obvious to anyone that has been following closely, I have no idea whether this inclination towards writing will continue. I make no promises. Enjoy:
I committed to Positive Psychology before Positive Psychology even “existed”. As a small child I had a deeply formed, perhaps rigid, sense of right and wrong. When I saw something wrong, I wanted to fix it immediately. Now with children of my own I can see the same rigidity, but it’s not only about what you perceive as right and wrong. There’s also what you will DO to right that wrong.
I had an older brother, nearly three years my senior. The way that we interacted was, as far as I could tell pretty normal and I think will sound familiar to a lot of people. I idolized my brother, and I wanted to do pretty much everything he did. He, having lived sometime without me existing on the planet, didn’t always love having a shadow.
At the bleeding edge of our disagreements was violence. I think I lost pretty much every fist fight we ever had. I can remember acutely the sting of these post-disagreement beatings. I mean, it really sucked to have your argument come down to a person much bigger and stronger than you beating you into submission.
But today I’m strangely grateful for them. They formed limitations in my mind. Everyone loves to say “color outside the lines”, but I’ve often find that ignores how important limitations can be to creativity. The injustice of the situation crystallized something for me. If you disagreed with someone, it wasn’t right to just pummel them into agreement with you. I knew what was on the other end of that pummeling. For me every beating deepened a polarizing divide in my own mind.
On one end of that divide was hopelessness. The thought that there was nothing I could do, that I was always destined to lose. That it didn’t matter if you were right, a stronger person could just muscle you out of wherever you sat.
On the other end was a passion that often flared to anger. It raged against hopelessness. It screamed:
“THIS IS NOT RIGHT” and “SOME DAY THIS HAS TO CHANGE”.
Neither of those was particularly an outcome I wished on other people I disagreed with, because hopelessness leads to inaction, and that passionate anger only deepens resistance. Think about what you really want when you try to persuade someone who disagrees with you. Do you truly want them going completely limp or secretly stockpiling for their revenge? I think not.
Our minds are designed to perceive problems and try to fix them. The brute force, overpowering solution is something we all fantasize about when we run out of good ideas. But being on the business end of brute force gifted my mind to come up with endless solutions to disagreements that sought a softer path.
So paradoxically, the thing that made me the strongest as I grew came from a position of complete hopelessness. When I started school I often found myself as the target of “bullies”, and while those times were unpleasant, in the background I started to forge friendships that were less fleeting and more meaningful than a lot of my peers. I had the freedom to pursue interests in and out of school with considerably less anxiety about what would help my status with them.
I’ve learned now that a lot of the rigidity I had about what’s right and wrong I would never grow out of, a common quality of people with ADHD. My parents knew that I “had” ADD (as we called it back in the day) when I was young and purposefully chose a path of low intervention. This meant that I was on the end of a lot of “end of their rope” people, mainly teachers who would report back to my parents that I just “wouldn’t try” and wouldn’t follow the program they had laid out for the class.
I resisted homework, and my grades slipped. I resisted it because homework did not make any sense to me. As it was explained to me, the point of homework was to help you reinforce the learning that you had made in class. But if you just remembered what you had learned in class, why did you have to do homework? Nobody ever made a compelling argument for homework to me, so I never wanted to do it. If I never wanted to do it, chances are sooner or later I wouldn’t be able to “brute force” make myself do it.
In the 7th grade, we had a science fair. My teacher accused me of getting my parents to do my project for me, based on the type of language I had used in my descriptions accompanying what was a very slipshod project. I liked writing, crafting sentences and descriptions, and couldn’t see the point on putting something on a poster board, so the project made complete sense to me. I didn’t stress a lot about the accusation and the teacher eventually relented.
Later that year my social studies teacher casually told our class that English was the official language of the United States. Having grown up bilingual and fascinated with languages, I knew this 100% to be completely untrue. So I blurted out that she was wrong. My stunned teacher quickly assured the class that I was, in fact, wrong. I repeated the opposite.
The next day she returned humbled, having checked her facts. She grudgingly admitted that their was no official language of the United States. Which leads me to the first major lesson that I learned from all of this.
Sometimes, you just wait.
If you find yourself in a disagreement with somebody else, sometimes the best option is to just wait. If you’re sure you’re right, and you’re not winning them over with “facts and logic”, just wait. If you’re really right, and you stay true to it, you’re always going to have more endurance than somebody who’s wrong.
True believers can easily outlast cynics. Most of life is a marathon and not a sprint. So you wait. You still feel all the hopelessness, and the rage that pushes back.
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